Ireland's general election campaign was officially launched this afternoon after the outgoing prime minister, Brian Cowen, sought permission from the Irish president to dissolve the Dáil.

As Cowen met Mary McAleese in Dublin at her residency, in Phoenix Park, the man most likely to succeed him as taoiseach vowed to seek a renegotiation of the European-IMF multibillion-dollar bailout for Ireland.

In his first press conference of the campaign, the Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, said he could gain favourable changes for the Republic from the IMF and Ireland's European partners.

On the steps of his party's headquarters, Kenny said he would go back to Brussels to renegotiate the IMF-ECB (European Central Bank) deal, although this would focus mainly on the interest payments Ireland has to pay to international bondholders.

But Kenny said no government led by him would ask for an extension of the period over which Ireland aims to drive its national debt down to 3% of GDP.

This puts Fine Gael at odds with its probable coalition partner, Labour, which has called for the timeframe to reduce the debt to be extended to 2016.

Sounding a note of gratitude towards the ECB, Kenny said: "Nor do we see ourselves renegotiating anything to do with the deficit, which we have accepted. And from that perspective, we need and understand the co-operation and the friendship of very many countries across Europe.

"This is not just an Irish problem; it requires a European response, and we hope to lead that when we get a mandate from the people."

Kenny also pledged to cut the number of politicians in both houses of the Irish parliament by a third, to force members of a Fine Gael-led cabinet to pool ministerial cars, and to save €5bn in voluntary redundancies across the Irish civil service and public sector.

He said Fianna Fáil party was now "irrelevant as regards the next government", and accused the outgoing administration of leaving "an economic wreckage which has destroyed the hopes and the aspirations and the lives of many of our people in the last 13 and a half years".

Speaking earlier in the Dáil, in his last speech as taoiseach and as a Fianna Fáil TD, Cowen said the election, on 25 February, would define Ireland's economic future and decide whether the country succumbed to the recession or moved forward from it.